The Leaflet #117: before you fire, after you fire, refreshing perfunctory feedback
Before you fire someone
In my experience, people’s uncertainty about whether they need to fire somebody profoundly limits their ability to help that person grow, if they are not in fact firing them. A useful question to ask yourself is “how valuable is this person’s contribution relative to what we think we could get from someone else out there?” In baseball, an increasingly popular stat in recent years has been VORP: “Value Over Replacement Player”. This stat is an attempt to quantify this “before your fire someone” question. How valuable is this teammate over a median replacement?
The time horizons to think about with a value-over-replacement-player approach are three, six, and twelve months. If you were to terminate this person within the month, how likely is it that you would have a better substitute in place three months from now? Same question at six months. Same question at a year.
What you do with your answer to the VORP scenarios depends on your context. In some industries, if you can get more value out of this person’s replacement within six months, finding that replacement is exactly what you should do. There are a number of fields where there’s no way they would do this. The quality of talent available to them and the complexity of the job mean it would be too risky and costly to put in a replacement, even for someone who is currently underperforming.
If you realize after looking at VORP that the person in question is going to be here for at least another six months, then you ask: can they keep performing at their current level for another six months? The answer is probably no. Here’s what you do next:
You need to find a way to express to this person the gap between performance that would let you say “I could have this person working here for another six months at this level” and their actual, current performance. Essentially say to them: here are the clarified stakes of the job. You want to get them to opt in to closing the gap as a condition of them remaining on the team.
How much do you invest under these circumstances? That’s completely dependent on the degree to which you are unwilling to terminate this person within a period of time. Ask yourself: what is the earliest I’m going to terminate this person if they don’t improve? That will right-size your interventions fairly quickly.
A sequence I find very effective, if somebody’s relatively safe for another six months, is to imagine what you would put on their performance improvement plan. What would make their contribution valuable compared to what they’re currently offering?
Before you present this as a performance improvement plan, if you have three to six months, present it as a sort of “re-hiring” condition first. Say: “I want you to know you’re not at the right performance level. If that were to continue, we couldn’t work together anymore. Here are the major behaviors, habits, and skills we would need to see for me to stop saying this. I want you to think about the fact that probably if these don’t improve in, say, a month, I’ll put you on a performance improvement plan that spells it out. And if improvement doesn’t follow from that, then we’ll let you go.”
“So I want to know that this change is actually something that you’re invested in. And I’d be perfectly understanding if you weren’t. So I’m going to ask you to take the weekend. Ball’s in your court—come back to me and say, ‘I plan to change this.’ Or not.”
If they say no: they are opting out. They’re making it easy on you.
-ben
After you fire someone
When a colleague is fired, almost no matter who you are, if you didn’t know about it until it happened, you’re thinking: could I be fired like that?
I think it’s critical that you have conversations with people almost immediately after you’ve had the appropriate conversation with the person you’re terminating. The purpose of that conversation is to let them know where they stand in the organization, what degree of security they have, and to name both of those explicitly. I don’t think it should be a subtle thing at all.
Come and say: “Today was [x]’s last day. I want to be really clear. If I were in your shoes, I might be wondering what happened. I might be worried that something similar will happen to me. I want to tell you the reasons why this is not happening to you right now, and what would happen in the future if this sort of thing were to happen to you.”
Explain that clearly, almost in bulleted, numbered form. Here’s where you stand in the organization. I’m incredibly happy with your work. I have had zero thoughts as to whether you need to be replaced or terminated. If I started to, here’s the first thing I would do. Then here’s the second thing I would do. And here’s the third thing I would do, all the way up to telling you that it’s your last day. That is to say, I don’t feel close to those things at all. And if you were ever wondering whether that is no longer true, this is how quickly you would know it.
If you’re having this follow up conversation after terminating somebody without a multi-step warning process, it’s worthwhile to name that specifically, too. “I made a decision that it was much more productive for the person involved to have clarity from me right away. I did that with the best interest of that person in mind. This is not what I generically or generally do. What I plan to do with everybody else is [bulleted list from above].”
-ben
Refreshing feedback when it gets perfunctory
A good 1:1 agenda for a manager and report often has a feedback exchange set piece. You both give and get feedback as a standard part of the meeting. Sometimes this exchange is split out as its own meeting on a monthly cadence: you give and get 2 appreciations and 2 critiques.
If you find yourself staring at that criticism box and coming up with small-bore things like, “You said you would give me an update on Thursday but it got delayed by a day” that might speak to doing the exchange a little less frequently than you are currently. Perfunctory feedback isn’t great.
In addition to extra time to observe, you can shift the prompt for the feedback. Instead of asking yourself “what is the thing I want to improve about this person?” target a more concrete question. For example: if this person were significantly leveled up six months from now, it would be because they finally started doing what?
If you already have a plan for a big level up over the next six months, you can make that weekly question: what this week was in line with that level up, and what were examples of not having leveled up yet?
There’s an affirmative, agreeable subtext for this question that can open up productive conversation. You, of course, want to level up. If we look ahead six months, a year, we’re both excited by the idea of you leveling up. So now we’re unafraid to ask the question: what did you have to work on and show evidence of in order to do that?
-ben
COMPELLING QUOTATIONS
Former NFL coach Bill Parcells on deceptive routines:
Don’t confuse routine and commitment.
Former CEO of Hallmark Don Hall on brutality:
In a business environment, you need to be brutally honest, and to be brutally honest you can’t have a culture that’s brutal.
Earth cataloguer Stewart Brand on realism about repair:
Repair is nearly always a disruptive intervention in an intricate system.
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